Hewlett Packard: The Printer Who Lived
by Neo plugged in
Summary: Are any of you hackers? No? Open-source lovers at all? Maybe? Well, I dunno if you like computer code-related stuff, but hopefully my story is funny anyway.


Hewlett Packard  
The Printer Who Lived  
  
Disclaimer: Well, let's see. Linux, the best OS ever, belongs to Linus Torvalds; the GNU stuff belongs to the GNU people, whoever they are; Hewlett Packard I guess is a trademark of, well, Hewlett Packard; OpenOffice.org belongs to OpenOffice.org; Microsoft belongs to Bill Gates; Bill Gates belongs to himself; and everything having to do with Harry Potter belongs to J. K. Rowling. I don't own any of it except the observation that H. P. stands for both Harry Potter and Hewlett Packard, not to mention Have a Party, which is good advice; Happy Penguin, like Tux, the mascot/symbol of Linux, which as I already mentioned is Linus Torvalds's thingamajig; and Henri Poincaré, who belongs to himself just like Bill Gates, or should I say he did, and who had almost as many random thoughts as I have. I also own the deranged plot. Yes, thank you very much, I'm so glad you like it. It is based on a true story, though I suppose some bits are a little embellished.  
  
The ancient printer sat in its utterly undeserved place on the sleek black desk in her parents' room. It was so old it still printed in black and white. Actually printing out a sheet of paper, though, was really not that much of a problem compared to the ridiculous amount of time it sat with its green "ready" light flashing, waiting and waiting, apparently sitting idle as the fuming user tapped a foot and waited for something to actually come out. Once in a while it wouldn't even print at all, and it had to be shut down and restarted a couple of times. It tended to plop lines of symbols in the middle of images, too. She decided it had to go.  
Her thoughts. The musings of the most horrible Evil Computer Geek ever to strike terror into the hearts of computers and their loyal friends.  
"Mom?" The voice was high and chilling. "Mom, could you do me a favor?"  
"What, honey?"  
"Toss out this printer and get a new one. It's awful. I can't stand it anymore."  
"You know, it does get on my nerves. We'll get another. Look around on the internet for a good one, okay?"  
With those words, the evil girl who had earned herself the nickname "Linux's Vengeance" became a murderer. She struck mercilessly at his defenseless predecessor and he was gone forever.  
The elderly printer was carried away, struggling in vain. She smirked and turned from the doorway... and he caught a glimpse of her glowing eyes. In the first second that he gazed, trembling, at the chips of blue ice jabbing at him from the safety of her pale smug face, pain erupted in his circuits. It was so horrible it woke him up. He shuddered, righted his black ink cartridge, and cleared away the error messages streaming across his 2 by 16 screen.  
He was sitting safely on the bottom shelf of the maple desk he never moved from, safe and sound, only dreaming of an innocent printer's death. She was gone. He had defeated her when he was barely plugged in. Yes, he, Hewlett Packard, had brought about the end of Linux's Vengeance, and relieved his entire house from her menace. (His House, was, of course, everything inside the Great Front Door.)  
Supposedly, though, Linux's Vengeance was still in hiding somewhere, in the deep jungle above the staircase. He could not help being nervous... she might return.  
  
Hewlett Packard was now an adolescent of a printer. Of course, he was no ordinary printer. He had used up a lot of ink cartridges, especially the color ones; displayed oodles of error messages; and had his share of paper jams. But he had also faxed, copied, and scanned his way into even more fame than he had started with. He was now in school with his friends, the monitor and speakers, for his first year. And he was already wrapped up in a mystery.  
"Hello, students!" cried the Headelectronicgadget. "I have some Unicode characters to share with you for the beginning of a new year. And here they are: ?! ?! ?! ?! Thank you! Oh, and one more thing... the Laptop Computer who comes to visit is off limits to anyone who does not want to die a very painful death."  
Hewlett Packard laughed, but he was one of the few who did.  
That had been at the beginning of the year, and he and his friends had discovered that something was hiding on the Laptop Computer. But not just any something. It was something of the utmost rarity, searched for all over the world. It was exceedingly powerful. It was all the information a computer user needed. It was the Open-Sourcerer's System. It created the Elixir of Life, a legendary substance that could keep a server running long past when it ought to have crashed. But as soon as the substance touched your circuits, so everyone said, you had but a half life, a cursed life, for your protection given to you mercifully by King Bill Gates, the Father of Microsoft, was gone.  
Yet someone had stolen the Open-Sourcerer's System in order to come back to power. And it was someone Hewlett Packard had hoped never to meet again. His only choice was to connect to the Laptop Computer and try to destroy the Open-Sourcerer's System before his adversary could use it. Hewlett Packard carefully and quietly unplugged himself from the CPU and waited.  
Sure enough, the Laptop Computer came. It said nothing to Hewlett Packard as he was connected to it. It never had noticed his presence when they connected, for the very good reason that it could not. Linux's Vengeance, as cruel to her supporters as to her enemies, had not allowed it to use ECP two-way communication mode, purely because it would not help to serve her own purposes. Good thing she was gone.  
Just then hysterical laughter broke through Hewlett Packard's thoughts. It continued for what seemed like eons as trembles and chills ran through every part of his body. Then a voice that he heard in his nightmares finally spoke.  
"Good thing I'm gone, huh? What an idiot you are. I'm here, Hewlett Packard, good as new. The Open-Sourcerer's System is mine, and so are you." Linux's Vengeance lifted up the cover of the laptop and revealed an imprint on its skin. Hewlett Packard gasped. It was an array of curving letters, and yet it was a horrible sign of evil. The mark of darkness - the GNU Public License! Linux's Vengeance pressed her finger to the imprint. It glowed, and out of the air appeared her old supporters. PDAs, graphing calculators, and even a digital camera, glared evilly at him and bowed to kiss the frayed hem of Linux's Vengeance's jeans. She surveyed them, nodded her head, and turned back to Hewlett Packard with an evil smirk. "Configuro!"  
Hewlett Packard gasped as pain shot through his circuits. The Open-Sourcerer's System was extracting information from him. He had never experienced anything so horrible. He thought his smooth off-white exterior would shatter. He thought he might go insane. But he didn't, because he was already insane. We all are, aren't we?  
Anywho, the pain finally stopped. Overwhelmed, Hewlett Packard didn't even move. "Hewlett Packard, the printer who lived. I cannot believe anyone could have thought he was more powerful than me." Linux's Vengeance tapped a few buttons on the laptop.  
"And now, Hewlett Packard... now, we duel."  
Before he could even move, data was streaming down his cable. The pain was horrible, unbelievable. The only thing he knew was that if he printed out this document, the pain would stop. Hewlett Packard scribbled ink down the papers as fast as possible and shot it out his other end.  
"Very good, Hewlett Packard... very good."  
Free from the electric agony, Hewlett Packard cringed. How had he let that evil scum get the better of him? This time he would resist. This time he would fight her to the death.  
He was ready when the next document came. He kept his focus through the pain and threw out the first line of text without printing it. But it was too much to bear, and he printed the rest and dropped it in the tray. The pain faded as Linux's Vengeance snatched it from him. He would have to try harder next time, how cowardly he was - but he realized he must have been successful when she roared in terrible anger.  
"No! You idiot printer! Where is the first line of my document?"  
"W-where is my ancestor, the Black-and-White?" stuttered Hewlett Packard, trembling all over.  
"How DARE you disobey me!" thundered Linux's Vengeance. "Print this, Hewlett Packard, or die!"  
Hewlett Packard was honestly trying to print the next document. Or maybe he was trying to resist. He really didn't know what he was trying to do. He couldn't do anything but scream and writhe on the desk, couldn't think of anything but when the data transmission might stop. When it finally did, through the stars that danced around wherever he looked, he saw that he had written wild random gibberish all over ten pages. Instinctively he reached for another and began more panicked lines.  
"NO!" shrieked Linux's Vengeance. Her face was inches from him now. Her skin was a disgusting shade, full of tints of orange and yellow and pink. Her long hair brushed his screen and he shuddered in horror. Her eyes were like no eyes he had ever seen, not black but glowing with light, blue as the blue pixels on the monitor, and so terribly evil that they shone fear into his deepest wires. She yelled at him again as he dropped the next page of meaningless drivel in shock. "NO! STOP! You will pay for this, Hewlett Packard!" Then she struck him on the power button and everything went black.  
When he regained consciousness, Linux's Vengeance was still standing over him, glaring in rage. "Fine, Hewlett Packard," she hissed. "Try this one."  
Hewlett Packard braced himself for another jolt of pain, but it didn't come. Instead the document was of a familiar type. In fact, it came from Microsoft Word! She had given up sending him anything but the gift of the good side from Microsoft. He had fought Linux's Vengeance and he had won.  
Linux's Vengeance smiled as the papers slid neatly into the tray on Hewlett Packard's front. She had done it properly this time - found a different word processor, OpenOffice.org, and it had worked. In fact, that moron of a printer thought it was a genuine Microsoft document. How stupid he was. She had fought the domination of Microsoft and she had won.  
  
And the moral of this story is: If you go by your initials, it's not only confusing, it puts really insane ideas in the heads of writers who also code and luv open-source operating systems and who have runaway imaginations. 


End file.
